Set among Duxford's other aircraft hangars, the Land Warfare Hall and the American Air Museum, AirSpace tells the story of Britain's civil and military aviation. The £25m project covers almost three acres and comprises an aircraft hall, conservation area, interactive displays, a learning centre and lecture hall.
I had serious doubts about what the museum might have to offer a female baby-boomer with no previous interest in military hardware. However, no child brought up in the 1950s could have been unaware of air power: visiting airfields such as Duxford just to watch planes take off and land constituted a day out.
Even if I hadn't anticipated reacquainting myself with such icons as the Spitfires and Lancasters of the second world war, AirSpace certainly met other expectations. The display in the aircraft hall is stunning and the mezzanine features a comprehensive series of interactive multimedia displays about how aircraft fly and how they are constructed.
In many respects, the information provided is exemplary and participation in the interactivity is irresistible. It's so irresistible, in fact, that just weeks after opening, many of the interactives were already broken. Several of the oral histories weren't working, while postcards inviting visitors' comments on what aviation had done for them hadn't been replaced and the museum's website contents hadn't been updated.
Whether this was a matter of housekeeping or financial management, one gets the impression that AirSpace's development is subject to certain constraints. The Imperial War Museum (IWM) is still preoccupied with meeting the costs of this new development.
Despite opening in July, AirSpace has almost £1.4m left to raise. In addition to its homepage, three web pages are dedicated to attracting donations from the public. It is significant that both the entrance and exit to Duxford are via the shop and that the admission fee (£14.95 for adults) is the highest in the IWM group.
Unlike the IWM's other recent additions - Norman Foster's American Air Museum and Daniel Libeskind's IWM North - AirSpace doesn't profess to be an architectural flagship: it is essentially a hangar. The "airspace" in its title specifically refers to British airspace.
Although the museum houses a small display about the aircraft of the future, its ambitions are modest compared with those of the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC, which covers the history of space exploration. The American Air Museum - dominated by the massive Boeing B-52D "Stratofortress" and also at Duxford - is altogether more awesome.
Planes and politics
But the fact that AirSpace's collection is predominantly historic and focused on visibly battered, bruised and patched-up aircraft doesn't explain its conservative attitude to interpretation. Perhaps Washington's legacy to other air and space museums has been one of caution.
In the mid-1990s, its Air and Space Museum found itself at the centre of a furore around a proposed Enola Gay exhibition. Plans to display the B-29 bomber used in the atomic mission that destroyed Hiroshima were frustrated by objections raised by the Air Force Association, the American Legion and members of Congress.
A petition initiated by B-29 veterans urged the museum to display the airplane "proudly". Support for their case snowballed, the exhibition was eventually cancelled and the director of the museum resigned. A "straightforward historical display" opened in 1995 featuring the plane's fuselage and a casing very similar to that of its bomb, Little Boy. The controversy contributed to enormous interest in the exhibition: it attracted more than a million visits in its first year, and almost 4 million by the time it closed in 1998.
Despite the accessibility and plethora of information about the planes on display - descriptions of their histories, technical details, their provenance, and oral histories by those associated with them - there is a real shortage of political detail. Given that AirSpace is, by definition, a museum about politics, this is a major shortcoming.
As a result, visitors are left to speculate. One caption explains that in April 1965 the government cancelled the TSR-2 project on the basis of its prohibitive cost; others describe how, from 1962 onwards, despite the expense, Concorde was supported by successive British and French governments and that, discounting its development costs, it eventually became commercially profitable. Ultimately, rising maintenance costs contributed to its retirement. What does all this tell us about the government's aeronautical policies from the mid-1960s?
More specifically, is the Westland helicopter on show at AirSpace the one that prompted Michael Heseltine to resign as Margaret Thatcher's secretary of defence in 1986? Were these nuclear deterrents related to the cruise missiles based at Greenham Common? Curiously, this problem isn't evident in the American Air Museum, which contains multimedia information about relatively recent events including the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam and the first Gulf war set among the bombers.
Has interpretation at AirSpace been subject to intervention by its partners? The museum has had funding from BAE Systems, Europe's largest defence company. At the time of writing, the Serious Fraud Office was investigating BAE sales in Africa, eastern Europe and South America, following allegations of illegal payments, and the company was setting up an independent ethics committee as part of a damage-limitation exercise.
The Duxford Aviation Society shares the site and acquires, restores and displays civil aircraft. Its Concorde, which is a pre-production model used to measure all aspects of the aircraft's structure and performance in flight, is on show at AirSpace.
But the information provided is very technical, and was evidently not subject to the same editorial or design scrutiny as other captions in the museum. Yet the society has a real presence at the museum. When I asked the society members, who staff the information centre, for more information about AirSpace's displays, they seemed totally flummoxed.
If the training of museum volunteers is a perennial issue, environmental sustainability is somewhat more current. From April 2008, all public buildings, including museums and galleries, will have to display their energy ratings - like consumer-friendly fridges and washing machines.
Given that my visit to Duxford coincided with the beginning of the week-long Camp for Climate Action at Heathrow, I was prompted to reflect on the fact that the site must have an unusually high carbon footprint for a museum (not least because of its airshows and regular pleasure flights).
But there was nothing visible to convince me that any attempt had been made for the new hangar to engage with these current concerns about the environment. Maybe this is happening imperceptibly. It certainly seems inconceivable that a new public building costing millions of pounds could have missed such an opportunity.
Sara Selwood is the head of the department of cultural policy and management at City University in London
Project data
Cost: £25.25m
Main funders: BAE Systems, Heritage Lottery Fund, East of England Development Agency
Exhibition design: Real Studios
Architect: HOK International
I had serious doubts about what the museum might have to offer a female baby-boomer with no previous interest in military hardware. However, no child brought up in the 1950s could have been unaware of air power: visiting airfields such as Duxford just to watch planes take off and land constituted a day out.
Even if I hadn't anticipated reacquainting myself with such icons as the Spitfires and Lancasters of the second world war, AirSpace certainly met other expectations. The display in the aircraft hall is stunning and the mezzanine features a comprehensive series of interactive multimedia displays about how aircraft fly and how they are constructed.
In many respects, the information provided is exemplary and participation in the interactivity is irresistible. It's so irresistible, in fact, that just weeks after opening, many of the interactives were already broken. Several of the oral histories weren't working, while postcards inviting visitors' comments on what aviation had done for them hadn't been replaced and the museum's website contents hadn't been updated.
Whether this was a matter of housekeeping or financial management, one gets the impression that AirSpace's development is subject to certain constraints. The Imperial War Museum (IWM) is still preoccupied with meeting the costs of this new development.
Despite opening in July, AirSpace has almost £1.4m left to raise. In addition to its homepage, three web pages are dedicated to attracting donations from the public. It is significant that both the entrance and exit to Duxford are via the shop and that the admission fee (£14.95 for adults) is the highest in the IWM group.
Unlike the IWM's other recent additions - Norman Foster's American Air Museum and Daniel Libeskind's IWM North - AirSpace doesn't profess to be an architectural flagship: it is essentially a hangar. The "airspace" in its title specifically refers to British airspace.
Although the museum houses a small display about the aircraft of the future, its ambitions are modest compared with those of the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC, which covers the history of space exploration. The American Air Museum - dominated by the massive Boeing B-52D "Stratofortress" and also at Duxford - is altogether more awesome.
Planes and politics
But the fact that AirSpace's collection is predominantly historic and focused on visibly battered, bruised and patched-up aircraft doesn't explain its conservative attitude to interpretation. Perhaps Washington's legacy to other air and space museums has been one of caution.
In the mid-1990s, its Air and Space Museum found itself at the centre of a furore around a proposed Enola Gay exhibition. Plans to display the B-29 bomber used in the atomic mission that destroyed Hiroshima were frustrated by objections raised by the Air Force Association, the American Legion and members of Congress.
A petition initiated by B-29 veterans urged the museum to display the airplane "proudly". Support for their case snowballed, the exhibition was eventually cancelled and the director of the museum resigned. A "straightforward historical display" opened in 1995 featuring the plane's fuselage and a casing very similar to that of its bomb, Little Boy. The controversy contributed to enormous interest in the exhibition: it attracted more than a million visits in its first year, and almost 4 million by the time it closed in 1998.
Despite the accessibility and plethora of information about the planes on display - descriptions of their histories, technical details, their provenance, and oral histories by those associated with them - there is a real shortage of political detail. Given that AirSpace is, by definition, a museum about politics, this is a major shortcoming.
As a result, visitors are left to speculate. One caption explains that in April 1965 the government cancelled the TSR-2 project on the basis of its prohibitive cost; others describe how, from 1962 onwards, despite the expense, Concorde was supported by successive British and French governments and that, discounting its development costs, it eventually became commercially profitable. Ultimately, rising maintenance costs contributed to its retirement. What does all this tell us about the government's aeronautical policies from the mid-1960s?
More specifically, is the Westland helicopter on show at AirSpace the one that prompted Michael Heseltine to resign as Margaret Thatcher's secretary of defence in 1986? Were these nuclear deterrents related to the cruise missiles based at Greenham Common? Curiously, this problem isn't evident in the American Air Museum, which contains multimedia information about relatively recent events including the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam and the first Gulf war set among the bombers.
Has interpretation at AirSpace been subject to intervention by its partners? The museum has had funding from BAE Systems, Europe's largest defence company. At the time of writing, the Serious Fraud Office was investigating BAE sales in Africa, eastern Europe and South America, following allegations of illegal payments, and the company was setting up an independent ethics committee as part of a damage-limitation exercise.
The Duxford Aviation Society shares the site and acquires, restores and displays civil aircraft. Its Concorde, which is a pre-production model used to measure all aspects of the aircraft's structure and performance in flight, is on show at AirSpace.
But the information provided is very technical, and was evidently not subject to the same editorial or design scrutiny as other captions in the museum. Yet the society has a real presence at the museum. When I asked the society members, who staff the information centre, for more information about AirSpace's displays, they seemed totally flummoxed.
If the training of museum volunteers is a perennial issue, environmental sustainability is somewhat more current. From April 2008, all public buildings, including museums and galleries, will have to display their energy ratings - like consumer-friendly fridges and washing machines.
Given that my visit to Duxford coincided with the beginning of the week-long Camp for Climate Action at Heathrow, I was prompted to reflect on the fact that the site must have an unusually high carbon footprint for a museum (not least because of its airshows and regular pleasure flights).
But there was nothing visible to convince me that any attempt had been made for the new hangar to engage with these current concerns about the environment. Maybe this is happening imperceptibly. It certainly seems inconceivable that a new public building costing millions of pounds could have missed such an opportunity.
Sara Selwood is the head of the department of cultural policy and management at City University in London
Project data
Cost: £25.25m
Main funders: BAE Systems, Heritage Lottery Fund, East of England Development Agency
Exhibition design: Real Studios
Architect: HOK International
